article 2/3/04, page-5

That article was a fairly old article, but glad you raised the topic of ARQ. I have been an investor in ARQ for a couple of years now and are currently considering whether to sell some and shift into a mix of AWE, HDR and ROC. Ideally I would like to hold ARQ until they pay a dividend and do further exploration, but unfortunately that is not until later this year, so for the time being I think there are better places to put money.

I was disappointed to see the broker report by Pattersons (posted on Arc's website) valuing ARQ in the low 80's. That said they made an obvious mistake in their valuation of Jingemia, valuing Arc's share at only $2m.

Kingia was a blow, Arc, although they played it down were quite confident of oil at Kingia. The dry hole wiped quite a lot of exploration upside away.

I have faith in MD, Eric Streitberg, who talked in his recent corporatefile.com interview about shifting the short term focus back to gas, which is reasonable considering they are still purchasing gas from third parties to meet existing supply contracts.

It currently appears as though (however I can't understand why) they aren't going to drill the 'Oil Well' prospect between Hovea and Jingemia as covered by the Hibbertia 3D seismic. Only thing I can think of is that the prospect may extend over the L1 boundary into EP413, Arc may be trying to increase their equity in EP413 further before they drill Oil Well (part guesswork, part wishful thinking).

I believe there is a lot more oil and gas in the Perth Basin but it is inevitable Arc will have to start looking outside the basin for long term success and survival.

As for Redback 1, hoping for good results later this week. Good luck to all. Any opinions / further contributions welcomed.